This scholarly volume is a welcome addition to the history of the
Great War. It goes a long way to resolving the many misgivings that
I have harbored over the years as the various efforts have come out
attempting to make sense of it all. I must admit that I also
overlooked the critical importance of Russian war aims. They turn
out to be unbelievably important and central to the whole situation
in which linked alliances were deliberately exploited by the Russians
in pursuit of their own aims.
That they all lost is irrelevant. That was the unintended
consequence of ancient thinking and imperialist momentum.
Russian War Aims:
1 To commence the dismemberment of the Austrian Hungarian Empire.
The first step here entailed the seizure of all lands north of the
Carpathians (Galicia & Poland) with a military demonstration into
East Prussia to demonstrate good faith and allow a negotiated
withdrawal.
2 To crush the Ottoman Empire by advancing their army of the Caucasus
into Anatolia and plausibly into Mesopotamia. Major forces were
concentrated in the Causasus.
Please note that this had nothing to do with conquering Germany at
all. However the treaty arrangements allowed their action to force
France into battle with Germany who was desperately looking for an
excuse. This same treaty framework also drew in the British Empire.
The harsh reality is that both France and Russia were striving to
create a winnable war. Russia succeeded by taking advantage of
France.
It is also obvious that the key war aims were in serious conflict as
they envisaged two major wars simultaneously.
It is hard to see how Germany could have fended off six Russian army
corps in 1914 instead of the two they faced at Tannenburg. The other
four were out collecting Galicia.
After that German blunders in managing the western front wrecked
them. A simple defense of Lorraine would have nicely forced the
French to sue for peace and allowed the British army to pull out. As
we understand now, for two years the only successful strategy was
defense.
The French were willing tools to Russian ambitions against both the
Austrians and the Ottomans. Germany and the British allowed
themselves to be sucked into it all. What is quite clear is that
both Germany and Britain were surprised by war breaking out and even
at the time had scant understanding of why this was happening and
allowed jingoism to rule rational choice. The French likely thought
that they had it all their way which is why they became upset when
Russian armies concentrated on Galicia.
The Road to
Slaughter
Richard J. Evans
December 5, 2011 |
12:00 am
The Russian Origins of
the First World War
by Sean McMeekin
Belknap Press, 324pp.,
$29.95
HALF A CENTURY ago,
the controversy over which country was responsible for the outbreak
of World War I seemed to have been settled. The “war guilt”
clause of the Treaty of Versailles, which put the blame on Germany,
had long been discredited. German and French historians had met and
agreed that history textbooks in their respective countries should
make it clear to students that no one country was to blame more than
any other. Surveys of international relations, most notably A.J.P.
Taylor’s classicThe Struggle for Mastery in Europe
1848-1918, published in 1954, tended instead to portray the
plunge into the twentieth century’s seminal catastrophe as an
automatic process in which decision-making was largely taken out of
the hands of politicians and statesmen by the military plans each
country had in place: contingency planning became ineluctable reality
once mobilization orders, involving complex and elaborate troop
movements across large distances by railway, had been issued. In
Taylor’s phrase, it was “war by timetable.”
Then, in 1961, the
consensus was broken by the German historian Fritz Fischer. Fischer’s
appointment to his post at Hamburg went back to the Nazi years (he
had avoided too close an involvement with the regime), and his
Protestant conscience prompted him to question the orthodox version
of events. Gaining access to the Reich archives, then located in
Potsdam, in Communist East Germany, Fischer and his assistants
plunged into the voluminous manuscript sources that documented
Germany’s aims, and the fierce internal political battles fought
over them.
To their astonishment,
one of the documents they discovered, drawn up shortly after the
outbreak of the war, the so-called “September programme” of 1914,
gave official German government backing to a vastly ambitious set of
objectives, including huge territorial annexations in western and
eastern Europe, extensive colonial conquests, massive economic
demands to be made of the countries the Germans expected to defeat,
and much more besides. Surely, Fischer reasoned, if these aims were
there in September 1914, they must have been in place in August too,
if not earlier. So World War I did not begin as a kind of automatic
process—to quote the title of Fischer’s book, it represented
Germany’s “grasp for world power,” a conscious war of
aggression.
When Fischer’s book
was published, it caused an uproar among German historians. The
controversy exploded above all around the relatively short account
that Fischer gave of the origins of the war, rather than the many
hundreds of pages of detailed scholarly analysis of war aims that
followed. Senior historians in Germany denounced the book as
unpatriotic and persuaded the German Foreign Office to cancel a
lecture tour arranged for Fischer in America; outraged in their turn,
senior historians in America, including Fritz Stern, Klaus Epstein,
and Gordon A. Craig, raised the money and the tour went ahead anyway.
In 1964 the annual congress of the German Historians’ Association
was dominated by the row over the book.
The implications of
Fischer’s arguments went far beyond 1914. They opened up the
troubling possibility that Germany’s war aims in 1914 were not so
very different from what they were in 1939, when Hitler was in power.
In the wake of the controversy, the issue of continuity in modern
German history and the longer-term roots of Nazism, hitherto
portrayed by leading German historians as a short-term reaction to
the humiliations of Versailles, moved to the center of the picture.
Fischer and his assistants produced a second volume, War of
Illusions, focusing on the run-up to the war and relating foreign
policy to political, social, and economic structures in Germany.
Others entered the fray with the thesis that the war had been
launched to deflect an impending and possibly terminal crisis in the
authoritarian rule of the Kaiser, the military, and the elites.
By the time the
controversy receded in the 1970s, the study and teaching of modern
German history had been transformed, freed from the need felt by an
older generation of nationalist historians (writing about a war in
which some of them had been personally involved) to defend Germany’s
honor, and liberated from the shackles of a purely political and
diplomatic approach to the history of foreign policy and war aims.
Among younger generations of German historians, Germany’s primary
responsibility for the outbreak of the war became a virtually
unchallengeable dogma.
Fischer’s more
extreme thesis of a deliberate bid for world power by force of arms
had failed to win many adherents, but even after factors such as
human error, misunderstanding, and chance had been allowed for, there
was still a general consensus that the brunt of responsibility for
the catastrophe had to be borne by Berlin. Fischer and his followers
had narrowed the focus of the debate by confining it to Germany and
placing it within a longer-term account of the origins of Nazism that
argued Germany had trodden a “special path,” or Sonderweg, to
modernity, involving the enthronement of domestic authoritarianism
and international aggrandizement at the center of power. So robust
was this narrative that for a time it carried all before it.
In this picture, the
role of other powers’ war aims confirmed their limited and reactive
character. Time and again, research into the origins of the war from
other angles besides the German one showed that, as D. C. B. Lieven’s
book Russia and the Origins of the First World War, published in
1983, concluded: “Study of the July Crisis from the Russian
standpoint indeed confirms the now generally accepted view that the
major immediate responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested
unequivocally on the German government.”
In this brief new
study, however, Sean McMeekin seeks to overturn this consensus. He
wishes to do for Russia what Fischer and his assistants did for
Germany. Has he succeeded?
McMEEKIN POINTS
OUT correctly that for a century or more, Russia had been
seeking to expand southwards at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.
Many of the relatively few international conflicts experienced by
nineteenth-century Europe revolved around this issue: wars launched
by Russia in 1811-1812, 1828-1829, 1853-1856, and 1877-1878 resulted
in the acquisition of much of the coast of the Black Sea, along with
a large part of the Caucasus, but the intervention of the other
European powers, nervous about Russian expansionism, restricted
further gains and stopped the Russians from penetrating into the
Balkans and thence to the Mediterranean. Russia, if one is to follow
the argument of Richard Pipes in his book Russia Under the Old
Regime, had a built-in, permanent drive for expansion, and when it
was frustrated in the south, it more than compensated for this by
acquisitions in Central Asia, Siberia, and the east. But the search
for a warm-water port in the Pacific eventually brought the Russians
up against the newly modernized power of Japan, which inflicted a
stunning defeat on them in the war of 1904-1905, closing off the
possibility of any further expansion in this region for a generation.
And so Russian expansionism turned back to south-eastern Europe.
It has often been
claimed that the Russians embraced the ideology of Pan-Slavism, which
sought the cultural and in some versions the political unity of all
Slavs. The trouble with this claim is that there were major Slavic
nations, notably the Poles, who saw it merely as an excuse for
Russian imperialism, while the complex alignments of rival
nationalisms in the Balkans meant that Bulgaria, a key player in the
region, had no truck with the ideology either, and launched a war
against Serbia in 1914 in pursuit of territorial gains. McMeekin
rightly dismisses Pan-Slavism as a red herring in the search for the
causes of World War I.
But he is far less
convincing when he tries to downgrade the Russo-Serbian alliance as a
factor in the run-up to World War I. The defection of Bulgaria, which
entered the war on the German side, left Serbia as the sole ally of
the Russians in the Balkans, one that Tsar Nicholas II and his
government could not afford to abandon. True, as McMeekin points out,
the Russian Foreign Ministry did not go along with Serbia’s policy
of territorial aggrandizement, opposed the Serbs’ drive towards the
Adriatic, and initially urged restraint on Belgrade during the July
crisis in 1914. But as he concedes, “Russia had no wish to see
‘heroic little Serbia’ carved up by hostile neighbors such as
Austria-Hungary or Bulgaria.”
So when McMeekin
writes that “to assume Russia really went to war on behalf of
Serbia in 1914 is naïve,” he is making a leap too far: the
Austro-Hungarian conquest of Serbia would have been an unacceptable
blow to Russian prestige, a factor not to be underestimated in 1914,
at a time when aristocrats and elites in Russia, Germany, France and
Austria-Hungary still fought duels over “affairs of honor;” it
would also, more pertinently, have cordoned off the southern Balkans
from Russia with a band of territory controlled by Germany’s
allies. Moreover, as McMeekin concedes, Pan-Slavist propagandists did
have at least some purchase on Russian foreign policy by warning that
any setback to Serbia would encourage Polish nationalists to rise up
against Russian rule. And the obvious decrepitude of the Habsburg
Empire, made manifest by its lamentable failure to exercise any
influence in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, encouraged policymakers in
St. Petersburg to consider seizing the ethnically Polish territory of
Galicia, on the southern flank of Poland, from Austria-Hungary in any
future conflict, to bolster its control over the Poles.
Brushing all this
aside, McMeekin argues that Russia’s real aim all along was to use
any and every opportunity finally to gain access to the Mediterranean
by destroying the Ottoman Empire and thus winning control over the
Bosporus. Russian military exercises and war games already envisaged
the seizure of Constantinople, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire,
and the subsequent rolling-up of hostile Balkan powers from the north
and east. By the early twentieth century the Ottoman state seemed to
most European powers to be in a condition of terminal decay. But it
had already begun to arm itself against the Russian threat as best it
could, especially after the Young Turk revolution of 1908 brought
about reforms in the administration.
This only went so far:
in the war launched against Turkey by Italy in 1911, which ended with
the Italian annexation of Libya and the Dodecanese islands, the
Italians had completely destroyed an Ottoman naval force off Beirut.
Still, the Turks had started to modernize their navy, with the aid of
British naval instructors, whose first action was to insist that
Turkish naval officers had to learn how to swim. Petty officers were
made to play English team games, perhaps in homage to the Duke of
Wellington’s boast that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the
school playing fields of Eton. And, rather more importantly, the
Turkish government put in orders for five state-of-the-art
Dreadnought battleships, with delivery dates well before that of the
first Russian Dreadnought ordered for the Black Sea fleet. Cruisers,
minesweepers, and submarines were also ordered, and the British were
brought in to modernize the naval facilities at Constantinople.
Taking all this into account, McMeekin argues that Russia was
propelled into war in 1914 for fear that the opportunity to take over
the Straits would soon be lost.
Yet there is no
convincing evidence to support this charge. It is possible, of
course, to point to the furor in 1913 over the German military
presence in Turkey, incorporated by the appointment of Liman von
Sanders and forty other German officers to organize the defenses of
the Straits. Russia’s Foreign Minister warned that “the state
which possesses the Straits will hold in its hands not only the key
of the Black Sea and Mediterranean, but also that of penetration into
Asia Minor and the sure means of hegemony in the Balkans.” A
furious press war broke out between Russia and Germany with
journalists on both sides urging military action. But McMeekin
massively over-interprets the significance of this episode, reading
the proposed joint action with France and Britain to expel Liman’s
mission as “in reality a prelude to partition.” In fact, the
Russian Foreign Minister was only talking about facing down Germany,
not deliberately planning a war. And indeed a compromise was
eventually reached over the Liman affair, though one which still left
a strong German military presence in Constantinople.
Russia’s military
and naval planning in 1913-1914, McMeekin points out, was concerned
above all with the Straits, not with Serbia. The assassination of the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand came as a surprise to everyone. Still, the
Russians did have contingency plans in place for an Austrian conflict
with Serbia. Their key aim in such a situation, it was agreed in
November 1912, would be to announce an immediate general
mobilization, so “that the actions of the Russian armed forces
should be fully developed at a time when Austria had still not
finished its struggle with Serbia.” This would force the Austrians
to deploy a large part of their army to the north, to defend Galicia,
thus weakening their thrust in the south and giving the Serbs a
chance. On July 31, 1914, the Russians ordered a general
mobilization, fearing the consequences if they only mobilized on a
partial basis, given the complexity of the operation and the amount
of time it would take to have every part of their armies in the right
place. But far from making war inevitable, this came at a moment when
war was already well on the way to breaking out, thanks to the
bellicose mood in Berlin and Vienna.
In any case,
contingency plans, military scenarios, and war games are not evidence
of actual intentions, not even on the part of the generals and
admirals who habitually engage in them, let alone of the politicians
ultimately responsible for making war and peace. Armed forces
constantly have to mount exercises of one kind or another; their
choice of enemy only has very limited implications for the realities
of policymaking. Unlike Taylor, however, McMeekin does not ascribe to
military planning the automatic function of propelling states into
war: he sees them as the deliberate expression of a conscious will on
the part of the entire policymaking apparatus of the state.
Yet in the end it was
the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia that set off the process that
ended in the outbreak of World War I, not Russian ambitions in the
Straits. Even the official Russian declaration of war on the Ottoman
Empire as an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary, several weeks after
the outbreak of the war in Europe, failed to mention the Straits but
referred instead to “Russia’s path towards the realization of the
historic task of her ancestors along the shores of the Black Sea.”
Moreover, and crucially, Russia’s opening shots in World War I were
fired not against the Turks but against the Germans, when Russian
forces invaded East Prussia, forcing the Germans to transfer
significant forces from the western front, thus fatally weakening the
force of their blow against the Anglo-French army.
McMeekin’s argument
that “it was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through
conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near
East,” and that “the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St.
Petersburg” and not in Berlin (to quote the blurb on the book’s
back cover), has other problems as well. It is not even borne out by
the book itself, which more reasonably gives the Germans equal
standing by concluding that “the First World War was the inexorable
culmination of a burgeoning imperial rivalry between Wilhelmine
Germany and tsarist Russia in the Near East, each lured in its own
way down the dangerous path of expansionist war by the decline of
Ottoman power.” Just as Fritz Fischer extrapolated back from the
German war aims put forward in September 1914 to what he thought must
have been the German war aims of July and August, though there was no
direct evidence that they had been the same, so much of the evidence
McMeekin adduces in support of his argument is drawn from aims
developed only after the conflict had begun.
Fischer and his
followers were aware of the many divisions and conflicts within the
leadership of the German Empire. One leading figure in the Austrian
government asked rhetorically, “who rules in Berlin?” after
receiving contradictory messages from the German capital during the
crisis. But McMeekin, after concluding that the peace party in the
Russian leadership, such as it was, had been ousted from power well
before the war began, treats all segments of the policymaking
apparatus in St. Petersburg as if they were working together as part
of one vast conspiracy pushing Europe towards war. In reality this
was no more the case in St. Petersburg than it was in Berlin. In
every European capital there were furious arguments and debates
during the crisis, and it was by no means inevitable that the war
party in any of them would triumph. In portraying the outcome as the
result of deeply laid plans for territorial aggrandizement, McMeekin
goes too far, just as Fischer eventually went too far in the similar
arguments he applied to Germany.
NOWHERE IS
ITS author’s tendency to see history in terms of plots and
conspiracies more apparent, and more tendentious, than in this book’s
portrayal of the role of Ottoman Turkey’s Armenian population,
which appears here as a Russian fifth column seeking to destroy the
Ottoman Empire from within. McMeekin shows how Russian war games
envisaged Greeks, Armenians, and other Christians rising up against
the Turkish government in the rear, burning down Muslim settlements
and destroying bridges and other arteries of communications. But
identifying this aspiration is a long way from proving either that
the Russians actively fostered uprisings before the war or that the
Armenians took part in them.
McMeekin’s bias on
this issue is breathtaking. The story, he claims, began with the
Armenian uprisings and massacres of 1894-1896, which he blames on
Armenian revolutionaries, guerilla groups, and assassins. In 1897, he
writes, “a new wave of Armenian sedition led the sultan to initiate
violent countermeasures.” But historians generally agree that what
was only a minor revolt against Ottoman exactions sparked wholly
disproportionate reprisals, leading to 100,000—in some versions,
300,000—Armenians being massacred by Ottoman troops, Kurdish
irregulars working for the Sultan, and Muslim mobs incited by Ottoman
propaganda. What seem to be the best contemporary estimates put the
figure of the dead at around 90,000. Hundreds of thousands of
Armenian Christians fled from their burning villages, or were forced
to undergo conversion to Islam. Atrocities were committed by the
score, including the burning of a church with a thousand Armenians
inside. McMeekin’s attempt to pin the blame on the Armenians is
absurd.
The massacres were
driven forward by the Ottoman Sultan’s paranoia, which saw
Armenians as agents of foreign powers—a view apparently shared by
McMeekin, who describes British prime minister Gladstone, author of a
pamphlet denouncing the massacres, as “the first and greatest
British ventriloquist for Russian imperial designs on Ottoman
Turkey.” These designs, according to McMeekin, matured into fully
fledged plans for an Armenian uprising. When it finally came, the
uprising, provoked by the Russians, and described by McMeekin with
much lurid detail of alleged Armenian atrocities against Muslims, was
what in his view sparked the Ottoman policy of deporting the
Armenians in 1915.Under the impact of continued Armenian partisan
activity, he says, this got out of hand, leading to around 664,000
deaths, the “vast majority” of them, however, from “starvation
or thirst,” not from deliberate murder by Turks.
In fact, however,
there is abundant contemporary evidence for massacres in which
Ottoman troops burned Armenians alive, raped, shot, and beat them to
death, and committed numberless atrocities against wholly innocent
civilians. The transports themselves were carried out with brutal and
murderous violence. The starvation was deliberately caused by the
Turks denying food and water to the deportees. Some non-Turkish,
non-Armenian scholars have put the number of dead as high as
1,500,000. Almost every serious historian outside Turkey agrees that
this was a genocide in which vast numbers of innocent people were
killed for racial reasons alone.
It is unfortunate
that, perhaps because he teaches at a Turkish university, McMeekin
seems to think it necessary to take the official Turkish line on the
Armenian genocide. In many ways his book is yet another salvo, this
time in words only, in the centuries-long conflict between Turkey and
Russia. As in his previous books, he is far too prone to see
conspiracies and plots everywhere, especially where there were none.
He writes not like a historian but like a prosecutor in a criminal
court. He shares with Fischer an almost monomaniacal obsession with a
single country and its behavior before, during, and after the crisis
of 1914, rather than seeing it in the broader European context.
Every now and then,
however, France crops up in this narrative too, and any historian who
writes on Russia and the origins of World War I surely needs to give
the French alliance more careful consideration than it is accorded
here. In January 1914, the French Prime Minister told Maurice
Paléologue, about to depart for St. Petersburg to take up the post
of French ambassador there, that “war can break out from one day to
the next … Our [Russian] allies must rush to our aid. The safety of
France will depend on the energy and promptness with
which we shall know how to push them into the fight.” In the
Russian capital in mid-July 1914, a top-level French delegation was
enthused by displays of Russian military strength. “There’s going
to be a war,” the wife of the man who would shortly be appointed
Russian commander-in-chief told Paléologue: “There’ll be nothing
left of Austria. You’re going to get back Alsace and Lorraine. Our
armies will meet in Berlin. Germany will be destroyed!”
In London, too, the
anti-German mood was in the ascendant, fuelled by worries about the
German threat to Europe and the Empire. More generally, the whole
spirit of the age, which affected the actions and the attitudes of
the statesmen in whose hands the fate of Europe lay in 1914, was
imbued with what a century later appears as an irresponsible, almost
frivolous attitude to war, regarding it as a sort of duel on a
gigantic scale, fought for honor and glory; or an inevitable outcome
of the Darwinian struggle for survival and supremacy between
Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Latins, and Slavs. Few saw the terrible nature
of the mechanized mass slaughter that was to come.
Richard J. Evans is
Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College at
Cambridge University and the author of numerous books on modern
German history. He is currently writingThe Pursuit of Power: Europe
1815-1914, a volume in the Penguin History of Europe.
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